The capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775 is remembered as a heroic victory, but it was won against a tiny garrison of two officers and 46 men, many of them invalids, by two commanders who could barely stand each other. This deep dive tells the story through Benedict Arnold, a merchant with an official Massachusetts commission, and Ethan Allen, the charismatic leader of the Green Mountain Boys whose men refused to follow anyone else.

After a tense standoff in a Castleton tavern, a spy named Noah Phelps posed as a man seeking a shave and learned the fort’s gunpowder was wet. At dawn, 83 men rushed the gate, a sentry’s musket misfired, and the fort fell without a death. The episode follows the looting, Arnold’s raid on Fort St. John, Allen’s failed race, James Easton’s lost dispatch, and how Henry Knox’s cannons and the split in British command shaped Boston and Saratoga.

• Why the crumbling fort held artillery the colonies desperately needed
• Arnold’s official authority versus Allen’s grassroots army
• The barber spy, wet gunpowder, and a bloodless dawn raid
• The race to Fort St. John and the battle over credit
• How Ticonderoga’s cannons forced the British out of Boston